As our Social Order Frays, Dems Need A Better Argument

In my recent piece on National Public Radio’s loss of federal funding (which attracted a high number of comments) I wrote that what became over time the left-leaning and relatively affluent audience of NPR had gotten out of touch. The left most often sees the world through what I would call a “liberationist lens.” Oppressive social forces are keeping someone or, more often, some group, from being fully or sufficiently liberated or included. Battling such oppression is job 1, and government is a primary tool in the fight. Often this is what is meant today by “social justice.”

But for more people in contemporary America the problem is disorder, the fracturing of social bonds, and what the great sociologist Emile Durkheim termed “anomie.” Lack or absence of shared norms and a diminished social fabric. This is what David Brooks describes as “The Crucial Issue of the 21st Century.” Here’s Brooks:

“The central argument of the 21st century,” writes Brooks, “is no longer over the size of government. The central argument of this century is over who can best strengthen the social order. In this contest, the Republicans have their champions and the Democrats aren’t even on the field.” Most of the Democrats, comments Brooks, still seem to believe that everything will be fine if they manage another New Deal.

“To put it another way,” adds Brooks, “all humans need to grow up in a secure container, within which they can craft their lives. The social order consists of a stable family, a safe and coherent neighborhood, a vibrant congregational and civic life, a reliable body of laws, a set of shared values that neighbors can use to build healthy communities and a conviction that there exists moral truth.”

One may not like the Republican champions or their answers, but they are addressing a felt need in a way that the liberationist agenda does not. The sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild also stressed this in a podcast I highlighted not long ago.

Another way to talk about this is how the author Bruce Rogers-Vaughn in his book Caring for Souls in a Neoliberal Age terms “third-order suffering.” First-order suffering is what comes with the human condition: death, loss, illness, pain. Second-order is suffering that results from human evil, violence, abuse, trauma.

“Most of our pain,” comments Richard Beck at Experimental Theology, “is due to first-order and second-order suffering. However, the modern world has ushered in a new form of suffering, what Rogers-Vaughn calls “third-order suffering.”

“Third-order suffering occurs when we are deprived of the resources necessary to carry and cope with first-order and second-order suffering. Life is painful, but it is doubly painful if we lack what we need to face that pain, if we are abandoned and defenseless in our experience of suffering. Due to first-order and second-order suffering, life sometimes feels like stepping out into a cold, hard rain to face howling winds. Weathering that storm is hard enough with warm clothing and rainwear. Third-order suffering, by contrast, is stepping out into that storm naked and exposed.”

Beck quotes Rogers-Vaughn on this kind of suffering, which is sounds a lot like what Brooks terms a broken social order and loss of compelling narratives for making sense of life. Rogers-Vaughn speaks of “spiritual homelessness.”

“Without strong, vibrant collectives to support them, individuals are more-or-less left to their own devices to deal with distress. We might describe them as in a state of spiritual homelessness. These unfortunate souls are abandoned, left to interpret their sufferings as signs of personal failure…They do not have adequate narrative resources at hand to understand, to ‘make sense of,’ their sufferings. They are simply left with market-generated narratives of ‘personal recovery,’ which, like insulin for the diabetic, are perpetually fragile in the face of what they are up against. Such narratives are window-dressing, a veneer of order imposed over what once would have been a durable sense of self . . . Their options are either to look within, blaming their sufferings on themselves, or to stare into the fog…”

Ross Douthat made a similar argument in his new book Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious. I quoted the following from that book, a different way of getting at “the crucial issue” of our time. Douthat challenges those who dismiss religion as necessarily oppressive.

“If your reason for avoiding institutional religion is the fear of the Inquisition or the Salem witch trials, or even just the stifling atmosphere of some pre-Vatican II Catholic parishes or Protestant small towns, you are letting a danger that’s increasingly remote push you away from the things that are necessary to mitigating today’s perils, today’s problems — isolation rather than pharisaism, narcissism rather than authoritarianism, a world that leaves you alone in your despair rather than a society that’s always nosing into your business… a world that leaves you alone in your despair” sounds pretty much like the “options are either to look within, blaming their sufferings on themselves, or to stare into the fog…”

If liberals are going to effectively answer the Trumpist challenge, as I hope we will, it will involve a new appreciation for what Brooks terms “the secure container” and for the costs of disorder.